‘Those hoping to renew the New Deal today can support left-wing politicians like Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn’
Photograph: Alamy

In our post-Occupy Wall Street world of rampant and glaring inequality, it can be tempting – even understandable – to hate the rich. From the Real Housewives franchise to the first family, American culture is brimming with examples of ostentatious wealth for the rest of us to feel simultaneously jealous of and contemptuous towards. But what if all that moralizing is distracting us from the real problem?

In her new book Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence, sociologist Rachel Sherman explores how Manhattan’s palace-dwelling, private school attending elite feel about themselves, with the goal of correcting our approach to inequality.

From interviewing 50 affluent New York parents, Sherman found the city’s ruling class to be more conflicted over their position than the elites of the past, but not so conflicted that they’re donating their pre-war apartments to the homeless. Whether their wealth is from inheritance, high-paying jobs, or both, they employ various tactics to make themselves feel better about their filthy lucre.

How to be rich and morally worthy: the dilemma of wealthy New Yorkers

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Today’s rich emphasize “sensible” spending patterns; compare themselves to even richer people; frame themselves as hard workers; obscure their wealth and donate to charity. They fret over how to raise their children into “successful” adult members of the upper class without spoiling them.

One member of the 1%, named “Scott”, who now lives in a $4.5m apartment on the Upper West Side, speaks in hushed tones about the anguish he felt as a child over “comments classmates would make about the size of his family’s house”. Poor baby.

While it’s good to be aware of how you benefit from a wildly unfair system, these thought experiments alone do nothing to fix that system; rather, they help justify and perpetuate it.

“As we judge rich people for consuming well or badly, working hard or being lazy, giving money away or keeping it, we create distinctions that legitimate the system,” writes Sherman. “Even negative judgments of individual behavior reproduce the logic of legitimate entitlement: to say someone is inhabiting privilege incorrectly is also to say it is possible to inhabit it correctly.” As nuanced and delicious as it probably is, you can’t eat a rich person’s guilt.

So what, if anything, can the wealthy do that will actually help?

Here’s an idea: become a class traitor. Actively work to fix and/or dismantle the system that leaves you so comfortable, yet so conflicted.

One need not become a communist. Once upon a time, a patrician named Franklin Delano Roosevelt struck a deal with the ruling classes to re-distribute some of their ill-gotten gains in order to stave off a proletarian revolution.

This was not a gift given out of kindness, but a ransom extracted by widespread unrest and the prospect of endless economic crisis. Nevertheless, it made things measurably better for those at the bottom and middle, at least until the forces of capital rolled back FDR’s reforms to their current, sorry state. It was a step in the right direction that should have kept going.

Those hoping to renew the New Deal today can support leftwing politicians like Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, and grassroots movements like Black Lives Matter and Fight For 15. They can fund independent media outlets dedicated to reporting on, and advocating for, these projects, and community spaces that provide education and mutual aid.

Hell, they can establish their own think tanks and universities. “The Center for Actual American Progress.” They can give to these causes until they’re almost out of money, which should relieve some of their dilemma. You can’t spoil your kids with riches you don’t have.

Or they can take it a step further and emulate the most infamous class traitor of all, Friedrich Engels, who used his fortune to fund the work of one Karl Marx and spread ideas that threaten worldwide hierarchies to this day.

As for the rest of us, we can participate in these same movements in-between whatever we do to survive, and maybe consider laying off the Kardashians. It might be fun to rib on tone deaf scions of wealth, but in the immortal words of Ice-T: “Don’t hate the player, hate the game.”